


Five Ways to Say 'I Missed You'

by ishouldwritethatdown



Category: Within the Wires (Podcast)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Domestic, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Kisses, Mild Sexual Content, Relationship Development, Sharing a Bed, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 10:07:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18496738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishouldwritethatdown/pseuds/ishouldwritethatdown
Summary: For someone who claims to prefer direct speech unimpeded by idiom, Claudia doesn't often say exactly what she means.(Or,Five times Claudia said 'I missed you' and one time Roimata couldn't)





	Five Ways to Say 'I Missed You'

She raised her hand to the knocker again. She felt the worn metal under her fingertips – it certainly seemed like people used it. Or they _had_ used it, at some point. That could have been any owner of the house, given its age. Maybe Claudia didn’t like people to knock. She had kept saying that the house was open anytime. That meant you didn’t have to knock, right? But Roimata didn’t want to be impolite or presumptuous. What if she just barged in on something she wasn’t supposed to see? She took her hand down again.

The latch on the inside of the door clacked and it swung open. The woman on the other side had one eyebrow raised and an otherwise bored expression. “ _Come in_ , Roimata,” she directed, gesturing with her free arm.

“Oh. Erm, thank you…” she trailed off, realising she didn’t know the woman’s name, although she remembered her face. She’d dipped in and out of the house while she was there and mostly ignored her aside from a handful of pleasantries.

“Yeah, it stopped being fun watching you like five minutes ago,” she said, turning heel and returning to the parlour. As seemed to be the case most of the time at the Cornwall house, there were art supplies scattered throughout the room. Claudia’s friend had her legs up on one of the loveseats and was sketching, and she got the impression that there ought to be more people around her. The house was much too big for just one person, or even two, and it was no wonder that Claudia was constantly hosting parties and inviting guests to fill it.

“Is Claudia… around?” she broached.

The woman didn’t look up from her work as she replied, “Yeah. She and Pavel are upstairs, somewhere.” Oh. With Pavel. Right. She flicked a glance upwards to make sure that Roimata had caught her meaning, and then returned to her sketches and her silence.

She wasn’t sure whether to excuse herself, or if she had already forgotten she was there, so she ended up slipping quietly from the parlour and into the dining room. The table wasn’t ready for a dinner party, but it clearly hadn’t had much time to get cluttered since the last one. There was some art on the walls, and she wandered around the room to take it all in for a few moments. None of it was Claudia’s own, but that didn’t surprise her – turning one’s own home into a private exhibition of your own work was conceited even for a world-renowned artist, and especially one as critical as Claudia. Instead the house was decorated with pieces by other artists, some of which had doubtless passed through here. There was no cohesive theme beyond ‘art that Claudia Atieno found appealing’, which meant that the house would never in a million years be mistaken for the residence of a collector. It was amusing how little she cared for the overall aesthetic of her home. It was a patchwork mess of a building, and she liked it perfectly that way, she said. After all, it didn’t just belong to her; it belonged to everybody who wanted to belong.

Roimata wandered into the kitchen, which was remarkably clean. It was one of the only areas of the house that art supplies didn’t often venture to – you were more likely to find a set of brushes abandoned in the bathroom than in the kitchen. She suspected there was a story behind it. Or else it was just one of those artist eccentricities.

She put her canvas bag on the counter and took out the loaf of bread she had bought in town before catching the ferry over. If she’d written ahead that she was planning on coming, she might’ve been able to ask Claudia to come and collect her in the skiff that was moored on the jetty, but she hadn’t. It wasn’t that her arrival was spontaneous, exactly – she’d been thinking about it for weeks. But something had held her back from making her presence expected. Fear of rejection, probably. It was harder to turn someone away when they were already in your kitchen, spreading locally-sourced chutney on fresh bread.

Oh, that was selfish and horrible, wasn’t it?

Guilt flavoured her snack, and she frowned unhappily. It was really good chutney, not to be wasted by a sour mood. Claudia had invited her back, and her acquaintance (whatever her name was) had let her in without surprise or fuss.

She found the living room – smaller than the parlour, and at the back of the house, but essentially the same – and decided to work on her embroidery there. As she settled in, her eyes drifted to the bath mostly hidden by the screen in the corner of the room, and her cheeks flushed slightly at the memory of Claudia standing at the easel that was still facing towards it.

She was on her way back from a trip to the bathroom when a voice on the stairs stopped her. “Roimata,” she said. She turned, and saw Claudia Atieno stopped halfway down the stairs. She had her hand resting lightly on the bannister, and was wearing a bathrobe and a look of pleasant surprise. “You’re back,” she stated. Like there was some uncertainty about it – like her time at the Cornwall house hadn’t been the most at home she’d felt in her life.

“Yes,” she agreed. “I am.”

Claudia smiled with radiant sincerity. “That’s good.”

Pavel made his appearance on the stairs and slid in at Claudia’s back, nuzzling into her neck. A tick of annoyance sparked in Roimata’s chest at his bursting into their moment.

“Weren’t you getting something to eat?” Claudia interrupted him, dismissive, and she saw him clench his jaw, finally affording Roimata a glance, before he resumed his descent and disappeared into the kitchen. She had to resist the urge to feel smug.

Claudia walked down the stairs slower, and Roimata met her close to the landing. “Will you be staying long?” she asked, pleasantly, but not with the kind of polite pleasance that masked disdain.

“If-- if that’s alright,” she answered, suddenly feeling out of place.

She just smiled and tenderly put a hand behind her neck, leaning in to plant a delicate kiss on her cheek. Roimata felt a delightful chill run through her as she spoke into her ear, just a step above a whisper: “I look forward to it.”

***

She woke to the scratch of a pencil on paper. It was the sort of sound that might ordinarily be lost in a big house full of artists, but early in the morning when the dawn was barely pushing light through the curtains, it was very nearly everything. The only other meaningful sound was steady breathing where Claudia was sitting up in bed.

“What are you drawing?” Roimata mumbled.

Scitch, scritch. Pause. “Don’t move.”

She groaned and buried her face further into her pillow. Claudia tutted in disappointment, and then chuckled. She heard the shuffle of the bedlinens, and then felt Claudia’s arms slide around her middle, and her breath got closer, on the back of her neck. “I have to hold onto you somehow. Always coming and going. I never know when I’ll see you again.”

She rolled her eyes underneath her eyelids. “I was only gone two days,” she refuted, although she couldn’t say she hated the attention. Claudia’s skin, warm on hers, was a nice sensation to wake up to. “If my welcome home is going to be like last night’s every time, maybe I’ll have to leave and come back more often.” She rolled over in bed, turning around so that she and Claudia were face to face.

She took Roimata’s hand on her hip as an invitation to come even closer, bodies touching, and kissed the corner of her mouth. She’d taken her glasses off at the same time she’d put her sketchbook down, to keep them out of the way. “Tell me what I can do to make you stay.” She kissed, and kissed again, and it was so desperate, so loving, that Roimata couldn’t help but indulge her. “Tell me what you want,” she said, barely able to bring her mouth far away and long enough to say it before she dived in again. Her kisses trailed away from her mouth, down her neck, and she sucked there. “My Roimata,” she breathed into her collarbone.

“Claudia,” she moaned.

“Yes.” She sucked, and it was wet and real and wonderful.

“Claudia…”

“What is it?”

“I want to see those drawings.”

Claudia pulled back at her incongruous remark and squinted at the amused look that Roimata could feel creeping onto her face. She reached over to the nightstand and handed her the sketchbook with a sigh, nestling her head into her chest. “Can I blow you to the moon and back afterwards?” she asked, and Roimata chuckled.

The sketches were all pencil, and all from the same angle, more or less. Some of them focused in detail on a particular part of her sleeping form, like her mouth or her hands, and it changed the way you looked at it, even when they were virtually identical in content. She looked at Claudia’s own hands, the way they trailed lightly over the stretch marks on Roimata’s stomach as if she was marking them out to paint. She looked at the way her lips were parted slightly, longing.

She put the sketchbook down on her own nightstand, keeping her eyes on her. She tilted Claudia’s chin up and kissed her on the lips. “I want you,” she said, and they fell into it easily. Their mouths pushed and pulled in harmony, drinking each other up. “You know I missed you too,” she told her, trying not to gasp for air. As she cupped a hand around her backside and pulled her close, Claudia’s hand reached down between her legs, and she moaned.

“You don’t have to miss me,” she gave a sultry smile, and whispered, “I’m right here.”

***

Roimata was beaming when the boat pulled up. She never expected to miss a person’s face in particular, but when she saw Claudia again, that was the most immediate relief; to see her face again, her eyes twinkling in the sun behind her glasses, and her smile stretching wide with the same euphoria. Claudia hopped from the skiff and into her arms as soon as she was able, burying her face into her shoulder and taking a deep inhale.

Roimata’s smile only faltered slightly after they'd pulled apart when she made no move to get her or her bags onto the boat. Claudia extracted a flyer from her pocket and showed her the ad for the pop-up theatre group that was performing in town in—oh, an hour’s time.

She deflated, giving Claudia a pleading look. “Please, I just want to get home. Have a bath, put my feet up.” She was almost positive that she would nod off if she had to sit through a performance, and that wouldn’t be a pleasant experience for anyone. “We can go another day,” she said, although she felt too tired to commit herself to anything for another week. If she didn’t spend the next several days in a jetlag coma, she would be surprised.

“This is the last day they’re performing,” Claudia said, a frown working its way onto her face.

Roimata glanced at the dates on the flyer. It was, in fact, the last performance out of three, any of which Claudia could probably have dragged someone or other to. She was being picky and childish, and Roimata didn’t have the energy to deal with it. “Can’t Chrisette take you, or someone?”

“I don’t want to go with Chrisette,” Claudia insisted. “I want to go with _you_.”

The emphasis on the word pushed through the jetlag clouding her brain, and she understood clearly with a sudden, strange wrench of the gut. Claudia didn’t want to take just anyone to the theatre; she wanted to take _Roimata_. She’d waited for her to be back, and was ecstatic that the final performance was in a time slot that they could technically make it to. It was flattering, that someone with as many friends as Claudia Atieno was so set on spending time with her specifically.

She thought of the bath she had been yearning for hours. Just waiting for her, back at the house, with warmth and cleanliness and a bed that was starting to become her own…

“Fine. But I’m leaving my bag here,” she said, dumping it into the boat and opening the hatch so that she could attempt to stuff it out of sight. “And if the theatre has to be evacuated because I smell like toxic waste, that will be your fault.”

She looped her arm through Claudia’s, who leaned in to sniff her. “You smell fine to me.”

Roimata gave her a sceptical look. “Love has blinded you.”

She laughed. “Maybe. But maybe I like it that way.”

***

“Claudia,” Roimata said, trying not to take her eyes off her painting. The watercolour was running down the page, and she did want it to do that, but if her attention kept being dragged away like this, it was going to dry too quickly to do anything with.

Claudia pressed another round of kisses into her neck. “Yes?”

“I’d really like to get this done,” she informed her, leaving the rest implied. Claudia was a fan of overt and direct dialogue, on paper. It didn’t always pan out like that in practice. If Roimata dismissed her too forcefully, she’d spend the next few days moping and avoiding her like a slighted cat.

She really _was_ like a cat, and it was baffling that she couldn’t see it.

“But I have to catch you up on all the kisses you’ve missed,” she countered, bringing another one up to her cheek.

She made another water-laden dark blue stroke on the paper. “I was only in Plymouth, Claudia, you could have visited me,” she said, and her tongue tasted of the salty sea spray she was attempting to capture with the white wax crayon that was underlying the paint.

She stopped her steady stream of affection for the first time since she’d joined her on the patio and sat back. “You know I can’t stand your flat there. Honestly I don’t know how you do.”

“It’s convenient, and it’s fine,” she replied, not for the first time. Claudia had been living in this massive house for so long that she didn’t know how to deal with living in a smaller space. She was used to being able to take opposite ends of the house and avoid each other for days when they needed space apart. Even her apartment in Mwanza was vast compared to the Plymouth flat. Roimata had never attempted to host a party in Plymouth, considering she scarcely had enough friends to bother, but any space that couldn’t be a hosting space was bad, according to Claudia. Roimata wasn’t sure she understood that some spaces were just _living_ spaces.

“Just let me finish this, and then we can go for a walk,” she promised. It was going to be a cool evening, and the perfect opportunity for hand-holding and then cuddling up once they got home. Plus, they could expend some of the slightly manic energy that seemed to be building in Claudia’s system. (Like a cooped-up cat.)

She hummed, resting her chin on Roimata’s shoulder. “Can I at least watch you paint?”

“You know that makes me anxious,” she said.

She sighed and got up. “Alright. I’m going to change.”

There was nothing wrong with what she was wearing, but she liked to make occasions out of things. An outfit for drawing, an outfit for walking, an outfit for the marketplace, an outfit for the theatre. It was no wonder she had made a wardrobe out of one of the bedrooms in the house.

“You should wear the red jacket,” Roimata suggested, although the only thing she wanted to do when she was in the red jacket was get her out of it. She wore it so damn well.

“Maybe I will,” she said, languidly. “And that headpiece you like?”

“Don’t show me up too much,” she teased. _And if you don’t want to be washing sand out of your hair for the next week, be careful_ , she almost added.

Claudia turned at that, smiling. “I couldn’t if I tried, my darling.”

The cool breeze on her face almost wasn’t enough to cool her burning cheeks as she returned her attention to her painting. It had a cool colour palette in the soft blues of twilight, and gentle waves like the ones that stretched to the horizon today, but suddenly it was awake with warmth and turbulent waters. She cleared her throat and muttered, “Oh, get a grip, Roimata.”

She hesitated a moment, and then dipped the brush into the pink and washed the water with a gentle hint of warmth at the sides. It brought out the golden colour that wisped around on the horizon, and she smiled.

***

Roimata shrugged her bag off her shoulders and left it by the stairs as she poked tentatively further into the house. They’d long passed the days where she ran the risk of intruding on Claudia and Pavel’s more intimate ‘artistic endeavours’, but she still felt wary after she’d spent a long time away. She sometimes worried that Claudia might’ve found somebody else to be her constant companion, that these trips were driving a wedge between them where neither of them wanted one. But the last few times she had returned home, she had found the house empty except for Claudia. Other artists didn’t often pass through any more, unless there was an actual party scheduled.

Claudia was nowhere downstairs, including on the patio, which Roimata glanced out to briefly. It wasn’t particularly good weather to be out—a reminder of the latest shower of rain still rested in her hair—but she had been known to take to the garden or the grounds in order to capture something interesting with her camera.

She got to the kitchen and found a plate covered with a dish towel, a note propped beside it:

_‘Mata – In Dublin until Wednesday. Hope your flight was good. See you soon. X’_

She removed the dishcloth to reveal a plate of cookies. Claudia had placed them in the kitchen to imply that she’d prepared them herself in any way, but they were clearly ones she had bought from town (much too uniform to be her own handiwork). It was nice of her to leave them though, she reflected as she bit into one – chewy, but with bite – glancing again at the note.

She had written when she intended to be back, which wasn’t something she usually did, as she often was persuaded into extending her stays or taking a scenic detour on the return. She had also, Roimata realised with some amazement, remembered what day she was arriving back in the house, realised she wouldn’t be there to welcome her, and had the foresight to leave something in her place. Usually they came and went without such extravagant ceremony. Claudia was always glad to see her return, but it hadn’t ever seemed before that she’d taken a particular effort to remember she was coming. Maybe she had been wrong.

Or… maybe she had just especially missed her this time.

***

Roimata stared at the painting with an unpleasant cocktail of contempt and nostalgia. She wasn’t sure why she had agreed to this. Making these audio guides – it was doing her more harm than good, staring at Claudia’s work all day and trying to think of something appropriate to say to the patron of a museum. There was so much of Claudia in every piece, and yet each one represented a gaping hole. It had never been more strikingly clear that she _wasn’t_ there.

But no one else could do it better. No one else could talk about that gap, about how much of Claudia was being _missed_ in this supposed remembrance of her as an artist. No one else knew her like Roimata did.

So one day she started to sketch. Her growing hatred of ‘Self-Portrait with Cat’ had reached a boiling point – she could almost understand now why it was unsatisfying, why Claudia had started it again. It wasn’t truly a self-portrait. It didn’t truly _show you_ Claudia Atieno.

She kept painting. More and more of Claudia’s art became her subject, part of this insatiable urge to complete the incompletable, to bring something back of her that wasn’t ever coming. Brushstrokes couldn’t replace the stroke of Claudia’s hand on her hip; oils dripping down a canvas in bright tendrils couldn’t replace the soft, wet kiss of her lips bringing colour into her cheeks. She had lost something irreplaceable, and all she could do was paint and paint and paint until she couldn’t do that anymore, and then all she could do was cry.

Until she had an exhibition’s worth of paintings that nobody understood, including herself, and it was a monument to all the words unsaid between them. All the ‘ _I love you’_ s and ‘ _How was your day?’_ s and ‘ _Come back to bed’_ s and ‘ _Are you really going out dressed like that?’_ s mounting up higher and higher in one big ‘ _I missed you’_ that wouldn’t ever be spoken because she wouldn’t ever be back.

All that was left was the taste of salt, and the bright red puff of tears rubbing her skin raw, and the silence of a big, empty house.


End file.
